Thursday, August 07, 2014

When you return from vacation, you probably have a ton of irrelevant spam for events that happened while you were gone but are no longer useful, like:

people leaving early/coming in late

lunch/available food

server reboots

weather/traffic warnings

One way to reduce this noise is to set an expiration on emails of this nature. Sadly, Microsoft Outlook has deeply hidden the UI to do this, so most people don't remember, can't figure it out, or can't be bothered.
Here is a macro that lets you set the expiration date for an email by just adding certain hashtags to your subject. Adding #today sets the expiration for the end of the day, otherwise you can use ISO 8601 durations as hashtags, like #PT2H for two hours, or #P1W for a week.